In D&C 87:4, the so-called "Civil War prophecy," we
read that:
And it shall come to pass, after
many days, slaves shall rise up against their masters, who shall be marshaled
and disciplined for war.
It is generally believed that this is a prophecy that would be
fulfilled after the U.S. Civil War and still in the future from our perspective.
Consider the following from standard commentaries on the Doctrine and
Covenants:
H. Dean Garrett and Stephen E. Robinson, A Commentary on the
Doctrine and Covenants, Vol. 3:
4. Slaves shall rise up against
their masters. The time frame here is the key to understanding this statement.
"Many days" after the Civil War and "many days" after the
world wars in which Britain and her allies call upon other nations for help,
then will slaves rise up against their masters. In chronological context, it
will be seen that the reference cannot be to the black slaves of the nineteenth
century South, who for the most part did not rise up against their masters, but
to all inhabitants of the earth who are in political or economic bondage in a
period after the world wars. Brigham Young stated that Joseph Smith and the
brethren had been pondering the slavery both of black Africans in the Americas
and of all the peoples of the world when this revelation came to him.17 In
other terms, a worldwide outbreak of demands for independence and
self-determination on the part of every conceivable ethnic, political, racial,
economic, linguistic, or religious group will tear the nations of the world
apart and engulf the earth in blood and war. We have seen this process at work
specifically in such former Communist Bloc countries as Chechnya, Azerbaijan,
Bosnia, and so forth. No doubt we will see more in the future.
Hyrum M. Smith, Janne M. Sjodahl, Doctrine and Covenants
Commentary:
In all these important particulars
the prophecy has been fulfilled. There are other parts which yet remain
unfulfilled, but they, too, will come to pass, in time. "Slaves are to
rise up against their masters" (v. 4), and the "Remnant" is to
"vex the Gentiles with a sore vexation" (v. 5). There will, finally,
be "famine, and plague, and earthquakes, and the thunder of heaven, and
the fierce and vivid lightning also," and thus the inhabitants of the
Earth will feel the wrath of God (v. 6).
Notwithstanding, there were some events in the U.S. Civil War
(1861-1865) that would be understood as “partial fulfilments” of D&C 87:4, similar to how Antiochus Epiphanes was a partial fulfillment of Danie's "Abomination of Desolation" prophecy during the Maccabean period. Consider
the following excerpts from James Oakes, Freedom Nation: The Destruction of
Slavery in the United States, 1861-1865:
Nestled within the larger
secession debate over the fate of slavery was a smaller but equally fascinating
dispute over what the slaves would do. On January 12, 1861, the same day that
William Seward was warning his southern colleagues in the Senate that the
salves might take advantage of a civil war by rising in rebellion, a Democratic
newspaper in Cleveland dismissed the forecast of salves insurrection as a
“popular error” among Republicans. If there is a way, the editors predicted,
“no class of beings will be less troublesome than these blacks. Docility is the
leading feature of the race.” The slaves “are more happy and contented than any
other race of people on the earth.” Left alone, the editor explained, a “pure
blooded African . . . has no aspirations for liberty as we understand it.”
Republicans started from a very different premise. They generally assumed that
African Americans harbored the same instinctive desire for freedom that all
human being shared. “Whenever our armies march into the Southern states,”
Orville Browning wrote, “the negroes will, of course, flock to our
standard—They will rise in rebellion, and strike a blow for emancipation from
servitude and to avenge the wrongs of ages. This, “ he declared, “is
inevitable.” . . . Traveling through the slaves states in May of 1861, William
Howard Russell found that “[n]one of the southern gentlemen have the smallest
apprehension of a servile insurrection. They use the universal formula ‘Our
Negroes are the happiest, most contented, and most comfortable people on the
face of the earth.’” On a plantation in South Carolina, Russell noticed that
the “fidelity” of the slaves was “undoubted.” The house, he observed, “breathes an air of security.” The doors and windows were unlocked. There was a single
gun on the premises. Here, as elsewhere, the planter had no “dread” of any of
his slaves. Near Fort Picks in Florida, Russell struck up a conversation with a
slaveholder who had joined the Confederate army, leaving his wife and children
“to the care of the niggers.” Aren’t you “afraid of the slaves rising?” Russell
asked, ”They’re ignorant poor creatures, to be sure,” the master answered, “but
as yet they’re faithful.” Russell heard the same thing in Alabama. “Not the
smallest fear is entertained of the swarming black population.” Similar reports
came in from farms and plantations across much of the South.
But Russell was skeptical of all
the talk of loyal slaves. He knew that insurrection panics had erupted across
the South during the election campaign and the succession crisis, and he had
read recent accounts of slaves murdering their masters—accounts that at the
very least suggested more anxiety than the slaveholders were letting on. “There
is something suspicious in the content never ending statement that ‘we are not
afraid of our slaves,’” Russell observed. He concluded that the slaveholders
were relatively unconcerned because southern slave society had made itself into
something close to an armed camp. “The curfew and the night patrol in the
streets, the prisons and the watch-houses, and the police regulations prove
that strict supervision, at all events, is needed and necessary.” As long as
the South was able to maintain this police system, Russell believed, it was not
surprising that white southerners would feel secure in their own homes.
When the war began, the
slaveholders’ first instinct was not to lock down their plantations but to beef
up the local militias, redouble the slave patrols, organize “home guards,” and
enforce the curfews. These were the official and semi-official institutions
that maintained order within the plantation by sustaining the master’s
authority without. Sheriffs, justices of the peace, and local police were only
one part of a much larger network of accomplices who upheld the security of
southern slavery. It worked well enough. Slaves resisted in various ways but
rarely rose in outright rebellion. They ran away all the time in the Old South,
but only a tine fraction of fugitives succeeded in escaping from slavery. It's
not surprising that when the war began, so many slaveholders expressed
confidence in the security of their system.
And yet there were indication that
the slaveholders were more anxious than they let on, at least to English
reporters. They nervously read reports on disturbances among sales, especially
those nearby. Daniel Cobb, a slaveholder in southeastern Virginia, reported no
disruption among his own slaves, but he peppered his diary with rumors of
insurrection plots and tales of slaves who murdered their masters. He paid
close attention to the stories about other peoples’ slaves escaping to Union
lines. In January of 1861, Cobb heard that a “bachelor was taken by his
servants from his bead at Midnight. Carried out of the house and beat to death
with an ax.” Outsiders may have been impressed by open windows and unblocked
doors, but Cobb was upset b the news that on the farm where the ax murder took
place, “the door was left unfastened by the house Boy.” In March, Cobb reported
that “People has several Negroes Runaway &c.” In April he “hurd of several
fires round that Could not be accounted for.” By June, as Union forces had
begun to establish bases in northern and eastern Virginia, Cobb heard reports
of slaves in groups of ten or twenty who “had made there escape.” Daniel Cobb
was fifty—too told, he thought, to join the Confederate army. But he made his
own contribution to the southern cause by helping to organize a local “Home
Guard” to monitor “all misconduct of negroes and low life white people of the
County and to keep the state of affair right.” Yet despite all this concern
with security—or perhaps because of it—there was no disruption among Cobb’s
slaves through the first year, except in November when the Confederate
government began impressing some of his slaves to work on local embankments.
The slaveholders’ anxiety revealed
itself most clearly in their concerns about the ability of government to
maintain order. They wrote pleading letters to state and local officials, and
even to the new Confederate president. Less than two weeks after the capture of
Fort Sumter, Charles Mitchell wrote to Jefferson Davis from Louisiana about the
“great fear” of a northern invasion down the Mississippi River and the “sense
of insecurity” that was already widespread. There was “a deep seated anxiety in
regard to negroes,” a widespread fear that a Yankee invasion would likely
provoke a “panic” that could only “be ruinous to our cause.” A week later
William H. Lee, of Bell’s Landing, Alabama, wrote to Davis suggesting that the
best way to thwart slave insurrection (and alleviate white fears) was for the
Confederate government to order all black men “in the army and make them fite.”
Barely a month after the war began, George Gayle of Dallas County, Alabama, was
already worried that so many of the locals had joined the Confederate army that
if any more enlisted, there would not be enough men left “to save ourselves
from the horrors of insurrection.” The slaveholders knew that the security of
slavery depended on the viability of their government.”
This is what made an invading
Union army so worrisome—not merely its capacity for physical destruction or
even its attractiveness to runaway slaves, but its profound threat to the civil
authority in the South. Runaway slaves and insurrection panics were nothing new
to southern slave society. This was different, however, because at stake was
the South’s ability to police the slave system in the face of an invading army.
Union authorities claimed that northern invasion of the Confederacy was
necessary to restore “civil authority” to those parts of the Southern where it
had ceased to function properly—that is, loyally. Hence, the U.S. Army had to
be sent in to fill the presumed void. This means that whatever else the Union
army was, it was not an extension of the slaveholders’ authority. If the
sectional conflict proved anything, it was that the slaveholders’ power was
ultimately political power.
The slaves could hardly remain
unaware of this, if only because their masters were so often indiscreet. During
the 1860 election campaign, observers noticed that the “colored population” of
Georgia was “manifesting an unusual interest in politics, and the result of the
Presidential election.” In Macon “every political speech” attracted “a number
of negroes” who “managed to linger around and hear what the orators say.”
Thomas Johnson, a Virginia slave, recalled that in 1860 “there was a great
excitement in Richmond over the election of Mr. Abraham Lincoln as President of
the United States. The slaves prayed to God for his success, and they prayed
very especially the night before the election. We knew he was in sympathy with
the abolition of Slavery. The election was the signal for a great conflict for
which the Southern States was ready.” Further South, George Womble in Talbot
County, Georgia, overheard his owner declare that “he was going to join the army
and bring Abe Lincoln’s head back for a soap dish. He also said that he would
wade in blood up to his neck and keep the slaves from being freed.” In
Montgomery, Alabama, the governor gave an impromptu speech “in which he dwelt
on Southern Rights, Sumter, victory, and abolitiondom,” while nearby “[t]here
were a number of blacks listening.” The slaves have “been talking a great deal
about Lincoln freeing the servants,” A Mississippi mistress worried in her
diary in May of 1861. The slaveholders made no attempt to disguise the fact
that they had seceded because Abraham Lincoln had been elected president. When
he was a young slave in Georgia, Levi Branham recalled, one of his “young
masters” told him about the 1860 election and said “that if Mr. Abe Lincoln was
elected the negroes would be free. Then he asked me if I wanted to be free and
I told him ‘yes.’” How would the slaves not know what was going on? (James
Oakes, Freedom Nation: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States,
1861-1865 [New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 2013], 84-89)
On June 10, 1861, six slaves from
Howard County, Maryland, escaped to nearby Washington, where they found a
regiment of Union soldiers from Connecticut. Clearly aware of the politics of
the sectional crisis, the fugitives declared—or so a Union officer
reported—that their masters were “secessionists in sentiment and opinion and
members of secret military organizations hostile to the Government.” The
runaways thereby created a dilemma for Alfred H. Terry, the colonel in charge
of the regiment. Maryland was a loyal state, yet many of the state’s
slaveholders sympathized with the South. If what the fugitives were saying was
correct, could Colonel Terry send them back to their traitorous owners? Slaves
in Kentucky made the same claim under similar circumstances. In November,
shortly after Union troops arrived in the state, ten runaways appeared at Camp
Nevin claiming that “there masters are rank Secessionists, in some cases in the
rebel army—and that Salves of union men are pressed into service” for the
Confederate. Like the Maryland counterpart, the Union commander in Kentucky,
Brigadier General Alexander McD. McCook, was not sure how to respond. Despite
the pro-southern sympathies of many of the state’s slaveholders, Kentucky had
not seceded from the Union. McCook had “no faith in Kentucky’s loyalty” but no
particular interest in helping slaves escape, especially if it might weaken the
unionists in the states. What, he asked his superiors, was he supposed to do?
Slaves often had good reason to believe that their master’s disloyalty would
justify their emancipation. During the first summer of the war, a black woman
who “absconded the premises of her master” was captured and returned to her
owner, only to run away a second time. Brought before a provost judge, she
“complained of certain bad treatment from her master.” Her owner, having
refused to swear his loyalty to the Union, was barred from testifying. The
slave “was liberated and her master sentenced to be incarcerated.”
Denouncing their masters as
“secessionists” was only one of the ways escaping slaves tailored their
biographies to suit the criteria for freedom established by different Union
commanders in different Border States. Where Union troops were under orders to
exclude slaves from their camps, fugitives often presented themselves as free
blacks. In late 1861, Major George Waring examined the blacks working in a
Union army camp in Rolla, Missouri, and found “they all stoutly asserted that
they were free.” Unable to disprove their claim, though he realized it could
not possibly have been true, Warring was unwilling to risk expelling free
blacks. By claiming they were already free, the refugees evaded the order to
keep “fugitive slaves” from Union camps.
Slaves often provided northern
troops with important military intelligence about the location of rebel troops
or their supply depots, and Union officers were extremely reluctant to turn
over such slaves to their owners. Two slaves in Fulton, Missouri—to give but
one example—proved such useful guides and had provided so much “valuable
information” to the Union army that General John M. Schofield “permitted them
to remain under the protection of our troops. To drive them from the camp,” he
explained, “would subject them to severe punishment, perhaps death.” Beyond the
immediate value of slaves who provided military intelligence, there was the
increasingly urgent question of the military value of slaves to the rebels.
“Every negro returned to these traitors adds strength to their cause,” one
Missourian explained to the secretary f war in December of 1861. Why, he
wondered, would the U.S. Army waste precious resources “hunting up &
guarding the slaves of traitors while the secessionists are robbing &
plundering loyal men in the western part of the state?” (Ibid., 167-69)
Once authorized by the
proclamation, black enlistment began swiftly, accelerated steadily, and became
organized. On January 13, 1863, Secretary of War Stanton authorized General
Daniel Ullman “to raise a brigade (of four regiments) of Louisiana volunteer
infantry.” They would serve three-year enlistments of the duration of the war.
Exactly the same order went out, on exactly the same day, to Colonel James
Montgomery, instructing him to raise “a regiment of South Carolina volunteer
infantry.” Two days later the adjutant general authorized the governor of Rhode
Island to raise “an infantry regiment of volunteers of African descent.” On
January 26, Stanton himself authorized Governor John Andrew of Massachusetts to
do the same. These last instructions to northern governors would eventually
produce a regiment of free blacks from several northern states that became
famous as the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth. By the end of January, General Saxton
was reporting the successful organization of the First Regiment of South
Carolina Volunteers and urging his superiors in Washington to let the men prove
themselves in battle, thus “giving them a chance to strike a blow for the
country and their own liberty.”
Yet despite the alacrity with
which blacks were recruited, the Union army never treated them as the equal of
white soldiers. Black regiments were strictly segregated and nearly always
commanded by whites. At the outset, black soldiers were paid—when they were
paid at all—at a lower rate than white soldiers. Not until June of 1864 did
Congress abolish the distinction in pay for black and white soldiers. Even
after that, most black soldiers found the traditional avenues to promotion
blocked. Long after they had proved themselves in combat, black regiments were
often relegated to garrison duty or manual labor. Meanwhile Confederate captors
refused to treat black soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war. Former slaves
captured in uniform were to be re-enslaved, their officers were to be executed,
and though the Confederate government did not officially sanction mass
executions it did almost nothing to punish the southern troops who massacred
black prisoners.
Hoping to thwart the mistreatment
of black prisoners, Lincoln issued an order of retaliation in July of 1863, and
subsequently halted all prisoner exchanges until the Confederates agreed to
treat black Union soldiers as legitimate prisoners of war. Helleck urged Grant
to use his influence and prestige to combat racial “prejudice” within the Union
army, and in speech after speech, Lorenzo Thomas warned white soldiers that
they would be punished for racial intolerance. Racial prejudice within the
ranks did seem to diminish. White soldiers who were initially hostile to black
troops often came to admire them. (Ibid., 379-80)
In theory the Union was committed
to universal emancipation in the seceded states, but in practice its armies
could not possible emancipate three million slaves in the areas covered by the
Emancipation Proclamation. If nothing else the Confederate counterrevolution
ensured that untold numbers of slaves would never make it to the freedom they
were promised once they entered Union lines. Even without fierce resistance
from the slaveholders, though, universal emancipation would have been
impossible to achieve in practice. Congress would pass a law freeing the slaves
of all rebels, and Lincoln could proclaim emancipation everywhere in the rebel
states, but not even the Union army at full strength could make that happen.
Most slaves never reached Union lines, and Union troops never reached most of
the slaves. If Lincoln was right, if the only guarantee of post-war freedom was
actual physical emancipation during the war, most slaves would still be
enslaved when the war was over.
“WHAT SHALL I DO WITH THE
NEGROES?”
And yet black men enlisted by the
tens of thousands. Families and communities uprooted themselves. For the chance
of freedom they risked separation from their loved ones, reprisal by their
masters, capture by the Confederates, and indifference or worse from their
Union liberators. The Union army was never prepared for them. From the earliest
months of the war Union officers were daunted by the numbers of contrabands
coming into their lines. A steady stream of pleading letters flew up the
military chain of command all of the time asking the same question: What am I
do to with them? Many arrived half-starved after strenuous escapes or having
borne the brunt of wartime shortages to their own farms and plantations. After
complaining the most slaves seemed unwilling to escape his lines, even General
Sherman was soon overwhelmed by those who did some. A year earlier General
Frémont had boldly declared the emancipation of all rebel-owned sales in
Missouri, Sherman noted ruefully, but how would he have responded to the vast
number of “refugee negros” now streaming into Union camps? “What could he do
with them?” They were “free,” he admitted, “but freedom don’ clothe them, feed
them & shelter them.” From Louisiana, General Benjamin Butler sent letters
to Washington wondering how he could provide food and shelter to the tens of
thousands of freed people, even as his own commissary was providing rations for
thousands of starving whites. John Eaton, father up the Mississippi Valley,
raised the same issue. Aware of the looming humanitarian disaster, Lincoln
administration officials, including Lincoln himself, ordered Union generals to
provide the freed people with food and shelter from army supplies. By the
second year of the war the military was feeding tens of thousands of freed men
and women and desperately trying to find shelter for them. It was the largest
program to provide direct aid to individuals the federal government had ever
undertaken. (Ibid., 416-17)
By 1862 the number of slaves
flooding into Union lines was so great that the government was transferring
them to “contraband camps” in all parts of the South occupied by the army.
Freed people arrived in steady numbers, often in boatloads. On a single day in
October of 1862, three hundred and sixty emancipated slaves arrived in
Washington from Virginia, “having at different times made their ways within our
lines. They were immediately sent to the contraband camp.” In November there
were reportedly more than five hundred contrabands in the camp. In May of 1863,
six hundred and fifty more contrabands arrived in Washington from Aquia Creek
in a single afternoon. Quickly overwhelmed, the camps soon became notorious for
their filth, disease, and criminal violence. Drinking water polluted by the
sewage led to outbreaks of dysentery. In December of 1862, the overcrowded
contraband camp in Cincinnati, Ohio, was described as “disgraceful to
barbarism.”
The Emancipation Proclamation only
worsened the problem by increasing the numbers. IN early 1863, visitors to the
camp in the District of Columbia were warned “not to enter because smallpox was
prevalent there.” By then there were three thousand people living in the camp,
with as many as twenty dying each day. As long as the epidemic raged, no one
was permitted to leave the camp, and the criminal element began preying on the
desperate. Gangs of angry whites sometimes attacked the contraband camps. In
June of 1862, the Union cavalry was dispatched to the camp in Washington to put
down an assault by “some disorderly whites.” Conservatives complained that
blacks were living in “idleness” at the expense of the taxpayer. More reliable
accounts described the inhabitants of the camps as “suffering intensely, many
without bed covering & having to use any bits of carpeting to cover
themselves—Many dying of want.” By late 1863 and 1864, conditions in some of
the camps improved as Union officials became familiar with the problems and as
private relief agencies pitched in to help. Federal officials set up “model”
camps, notably Freedman’s Village in Arlington, Virginia, on the confiscated
state of Robert E. Lee’s wife. It is not clear, however, that there was general
improvement over time, if only because the numbers of contrabands grew exponentially
and the army remained overwhelmed.
The alternative to the camps—or at
least the alternative that came immediately to the minds of antislavery
Republicans—was to put the former slaves back to work as free laborers. Though
“able-bodied male contrabands” could enlist in the Union army, Lincoln
admitted, “the rest are in confusion and destruction.” Rather than let him
suffer in camps, it would be better for the Union army to locate abandoned
plantations and “put as many contrabands on such, as they will hold—that is, as
can drew subsistence from them.” Loyal owners could employ them “on wages, to
be paid to the contrabands themselves.” Responding to Lincoln’s suggestion in
March of 1863, General Stephen Hurlbut ordered two large contraband camps on
the Mississippi River “to be broken up, and all the negroes not in the actual
service of the United States will be sent to Island no. 10 and set to work.”
This, at least, was more consistent with general Republican Party principles.
If emancipation meant anything, it meant not contraband camps or colonization
but free labor.
Yet even as General Hurlbut was
closing down contraband camps and sending the freed people to work for wages on
abandoned plantations, other Union officers were rounding up unemployed freed
people on the streets of New Orleans and Memphis and sending them to contraband
camps to earn their own “subsistence.” In an attempt to prevent the recapture
and re-enslavement of freed people, the Union army, especially in the
Mississippi Valley, forcibly removed thousands of contrabands from their farms
and plantations to areas at a safe distance from the Confederates—not only onto
islands in the Mississippi River but also to Memphis and sometimes as far away
as Cincinnati. (Ibid., 419-20)
